Judges are strange and out-of-touch? Think again - they're the salt of the earth

Judges are far from the strange, dusty creatures of popular imagination Credit:
-/Getty Images

Judge Patricia Lynch has become a cult hero overnight. When John Hennigan – the persistent offender she had just jailed for racist abuse – started yelling foul-mouthed insults at her, Judge Lynch replied: “You are a bit of a c*** yourself.

In the popular imagination, a judge is a strange, dusty creature: one who scuttles in ancient cloisters, safe from the rough manners of the hoi-polloi

I think we can agree that Judge Lynch’s remarks were fair comment, if not the most elegant repartee. What has shocked – and in most cases thrilled – people is not the coarseness of the epithet, but the fact it fell so easily from the prim, sterile mouth of a judge.

“I never thought I’d have a favourite judge,” marvelled one friend on Facebook, as though she had suddenly discovered a sea slug with a lovable side.

In the popular imagination, a judge is a strange, dusty creature: one who scuttles in ancient cloisters, safe from the rough manners of hoi-polloi, only popping out from time to time to ask what is meant by “Gazza” or “Linford Christie’s lunchbox”.

It pleases us to look down on judges as hopelessly out-of-touch and otherworldly, perhaps because we are all a tiny bit scared of them. Or perhaps it is just a lazy habit left over from the counter-cultural Sixties, when the entire Establishment was written off as a cabal of reactionary white men, incapable of understanding the modern world.

Actors, journalists and pop stars are all disproportionately likely to have been to private school, yet they are seldom sneered at for being out-of-touch

That is a very undesirable situation, not least because of what it says about Britain’s education system – but it is hardly unique.

Actors, journalists, pop stars, even Olympic athletes are all disproportionately likely to have been to private school. Yet they are seldom sneered at for being out-of-touch – despite the fact that, in most cases, they have a much narrower experience of modern society.

John Hennigan, whose four-letter insult at Judge Patricia Lynch was returned in form by the judgeCredit:
File picture/Ed Willcox

Judges spend their days before a never-ending parade of villains, victims and misfits, from benefit cheats to tax evaders, teenage gangsters to battered wives. Only doctors, police officers and MPs – their fellow Establishment pillars – get up close to such a wide variety of human beings.

Some years ago I did jury service in the case of a man accused of dealing heroin and cocaine. The prosecution’s evidence was largely concerned with the byzantine methods modern drug-dealers use to communicate without being traced: swapping sim cards, using a disposable “burner” phone and so on.

An eager young barrister kept handing out pages covered in phone numbers and mysterious acronyms, all linked by thin red lines: a dense cat’s cradle representing the conversational history of north London’s narco-criminals.

Judges spend their days before a never-ending parade of villains, victims and misfits... only doctors, police officers and MPs get up close to such a wide variety of human beings

To us, the 12 “ordinary people” of the jury, it was like trying to find answers in a spirograph doodle annotated by a drunk. But the judge – white, middle-aged, patrician – was completely fluent in the habits and jargon of the criminal underworld.

With avuncular patience he fielded our stream of scribbled queries – “What is Jam?” “How much is an Elbow?” – and explained the delicate heirarchy of a drugs cartel.

Judges may not always be up to date with pop culture (are you?) but they see more of this grimy, violent, sad and strange world than most of us ever will. A little Anglo-Saxon vulgarity is the least of it.